StraightAhead » Fire Fighting

My Second Day

Terry — Sat, 18 Nov 2006 18:44:30 +0000

I’m here at the firestation working my second day on. I just gave a tour to a group of tiger cubs and cub scouts. They were very well mannered and cute. It’s always nice to give a tour to a group like that. The adults had a lot of good questions about the fire dept. and how it works with paid and volunteer people. I raised the aerial ladder for them for the finale. I have 4 days straight coming up over Thanksgiving because one of the paid guys is on vacation at Disney World.

New York Rescues

Terry — Sun, 23 Apr 2006 13:49:50 +0000

I found this interesting article this morning. It’s about some of the responsibilities that fire fighters have all over the country and what we are trained in. It is a pretty cool part of the job which includes rappelling which is loads of fun.

Wish I was Here

Terry — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 20:31:00 +0000

IMG_1676

Originally uploaded by Memphis Joe.

I’m back at work today for a two day stent. I would much rather be in the Rockies hiking. I took this shot when we were in Alberta, Canada. I’ve had just one call so far, another suicide, this one suceeded too. I didn’t really need to be there, but that happens a lot. I am really enjoying the new fire station.

Interest

Terry — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 02:24:00 +0000

There’s been some interest in posts i’ve done concerning Fire Department stuff, so I will probably be doing more of those. Maybe that could be a niche for me to fill, hope so.

Days Off

Terry — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 01:50:00 +0000

Firemen get a lot of time off, or it seems so. This is mainly because when they are at work they work 24 hour shifts. There are all kinds of combinations of these 24 hour shifts. When I was on the large fire dept. in Tennessee that I belonged to for 7 years we worked 24 on, 24 off, 24 on , 24 off, 24 on and then four days off. Where I am now we work 48 on and four days off. We used to work 24 on and 48 off. It all works out to about the same amount of hours in a work week. I average about 53 now. It won’t average 53 hours exactly so every month they end up paying us 4 hours of overtime, which is a good thing. Firemen have a lot of time away from the station because when we are there we are there for a long time. I work about 10 days a month, but that is 240 hours at the work place which means at any time you can go from complete boredom to all out physical and sometimes very exciting labor. It can be very dangerous or not, most of the time it’s not. I love the work schedule and have been working this way for 32 years or so on two different fire departments. One other thing is vacation time. I get 15 shifts a year off because I have been on the department a long time. The new hires top out at 10 I believe. So if I take two 24 hour shifts off then I can be away from the work place/fire station for 10 days. 4 days off on either side of the 2 work days. 4 vacation days gives me 16 away from the job and so on. I guarantee I need the time off to spin down from an over abundance of medical calls. Calls come in spurts too which is another Fire Dept. phenomenon. You might have a 2 day shift that is very quiet with nothing much going on other than your station work which really doesn’t take to long to do, but another 2 day shift may be very different with a lot of calls of all kinds. It’s just the way it goes. I work a lot of 3 and 4 day shifts because of the small number of career firemen on our department. There are three guys that work at each station one at a time doing their 2 days. If one of us three take vacation or sick time off then the other two work one of his two days, thus a three day shift for each of the other two guys. The extra days are overtime though. Good thing. I’ve worked a few 4 day shifts and a couple 8 day shifts during hurricanes, when we are all called in for the duration.

Tough Nite

Terry — Sun, 14 Aug 2005 01:00:00 +0000

I’ve been on duty here at fire station 2 for three days now. Last evening turned out to be pretty busy. I had five calls starting after 7pm and ending around 3:30 am today. The first two were medical calls that were pretty bad. The last one was a wreck with a flip over of one of the vehicles. I don’t remember the other two. That’s kind of a weird thing. The particulars of calls don’t stay with me very long anymore unless they are just really unusual in some way or another. I forget those pretty soon too. I am pretty sure it is partly a defense mechanism and partly that I have just had so many calls in my career I can’t remember one in particular anymore. Of course the first ones I ever went to still are with me and those were some 33 years ago. I went home tonight for a while to watch Battle Star Galactica on the tivo machine with the family. The kids were all over at the house. Tomorrow, church, which I haven’t been to in a while because I have been working so many extra days. That’s about it for now.

Medical Calls Part Two

Terry — Tue, 26 Jul 2005 19:19:00 +0000

Ok, so here I am making lots of medical calls. Many are serious, many aren’t so much. I think you have to have some compassion for people and their problems to stay with a job like this. I see compassion in some of the folks that I work with on these calls, but I know that many just see it as a job. The volunteers that do it definitely have compassion or they wouldn’t be doing it, but part of their motivation is just the pure excitement of certain kinds of calls and being able to rush to a scene and do some exciting work that may help someone.
You definitely see a side of life that you are not otherwise privy to. That other side is sometimes pretty seamey. People live in all sorts of ways, some not so clean and wholesome and healthy. In my opinion many people bring on the problems, health or otherwise, that is their plight. This is an obvious truth I suppose, but it is easy to get to a place where you don’t really care what happens to certain folks, because they obviously don’t care enough to do anything about the problems in their lives. As health care providers we are supposed to treat all people the same and I guess think of them the same and for the most part , that happens. It messes with your mind though. I keep thinking survival of the fittest, and oh well. I definitely see people not being treated the same by the police and some ems people. I know that there is a burn out factor and I think to myself on the scene sometime that a particular person needs to take a long break from his job and get back to some normality, if that is possible. Many times on a cpr scene, it is obvious to me that the particular person is dead and after many shocks and all the chemicals possible, the person is still flat lining. They are still loaded into the ambulance and cpr is continued to no avail. I realize that this is done for the benefit of the family members that may be there. I guess it should be done too. It is so obvious sometimes but I don’t think the family wants to see “obvious”. There are the really good stories though, like the little boy who was at the bottom of a swimming pool, nobody knew how long, who was revived and saved by the quick thinking of one of the neighbors at the pool and by expert paramedic from my town. Those make your day. I’ve rambled long enough.

Medical Calls

Terry — Tue, 26 Jul 2005 15:53:00 +0000

I’m on a small fire department as some of you may know. I began on a large 1500 man fully paid fire department. The one I am on now has 13 career firemen and about 100 volunteers. The first 10 or 15 years of my fire career was a time when the fire side of departments and the medical/ambulance side of fire departments was pretty much separated. We were in the house with the “ems people” but they manned the ambulances at all times. Never did any of the “fire” personnel move from their fire apparatus to work the day on the ambulance. We liked that just fine, we had signed up to be fire fighters. Those early drivers were great at basic life support techniques but basically would try and stabilize the patient enough to take off to the hospital as quickly as possible. Sadly, the ambulances were referred to as meat wagons quite often, because they were basically a means of transport to the hospital e.r. Sometime in the late 70′s all that started to change. ems people were being further educated to have more skills such as starting iv’s and being able to intubate(oxygen tube to the lungs) Not long after these changes were taking place there was a move to educate all fire fighters so that they would have medical training and be able to eventually function on the ems side of fire Departments. I would guess around the middle 80′s this process started. Now virtually all, if not all Fire Departments have as a pre requisite that you be medically trained(have at least an emt certificate)before you can be hired as a firefighter on their department and large fire departments put you through their own fire school and you come out of there either as an emt or paramedic. Many of the old school firefighters were drug into this era kicking and screaming and many of them just retired or quit. I know in my small town at least two of the former career firemen quit when we were forced to take a 40 hour eca course and become “first responders” in January of 2004. I had mixed feelings about it, but I wasn’t ready to retire and sort of looked forward to learning something new. First of all, being a first responder fire dept. means that fire personnel(in fire trucks, etc.)go out on ems calls when the ambulance gets the call. On my fire dept. We don’t make all ems calls but make calls based on criteria that have been set out before hand. In a nut shell, we make all the more serious heart calls, infant calls, difficulty or not breathing calls and a few more. Until the dispatchers got this straight, in the beginning, we were making all calls. That got old fast. Things have calmed down quite a bit and are as they should be now, more or less. The other half of this story will be upcoming.

Fire Poles

Terry — Wed, 13 Jul 2005 14:12:00 +0000

I found this article to be pretty interesting, since I definitely have opinions about the subject. There is a new fire station 2 being built in my town as I write this. I will be occupying it about September or October, if all goes to plan. Of course they didn’t ask me to much about what I wanted the station to be like and I knew from the outset that there would be no second story therefore no poles in the station. I worked on the fire department in Memphis for 7 years before coming to this Texas town and I worked at many stations with Poles and I really miss them along with ladder trucks that have a tillerman in the back for driving the rear wheels. I did that while in Memphis, among other jobs that I had on the FD. I worked at one station in my Battalion District that had poles and a Dalmation. Imagine that. Too bad that now, poles seem to be going away as well.

Blah Blah

Terry — Sun, 03 Apr 2005 20:32:00 +0000

I’m bored here at work so I thought I would post something. I’m still getting over an allergy thing which settled in my chest and gave me laringitis just before it got to this point. Same old story, I’ll cough for about a week before I get rid of it. It makes for very sleepless nights. There must be some new medicine to get the crud up a little quicker. The weather here has been matchless the last couple days. low humidity and in the 70′s for highs. I feel the need to go hear some live music while I’m off starting tomorrow. I haven’t heard any in a while. I still need to start my own group to do some Chet Baker and Lee Morgan stuff, maybe some Kenny Dorham too. I haven’t listened to him enough. I need to get some of his music at the itunes store. I feel a nap coming on. Pretty soon part of my family is coming to visit, that will be good. That’s about it for now.